New research provides evidence that how people in the United States respond to the coronavirus pandemic is related to their partisan media preferences.
The study, published in the journal BMJ Global Health, indicates that those who trust left-leaning CNN more than right-leaning Fox News have engaged in more preventive behaviors — such as social distancing and wearing a mask — compared to those who trust Fox News more than CNN.
“We have been paying attention to the health messages that the media conveyed since the beginning of the pandemic. We know that the news media have important roles to play in the public health crises. Especially in a pandemic like this, without a vaccine, health messaging is probably one of the very few ways that we can do to slow the spread of the virus,” said study authors Erfei Zhao and Qiao Wu, who are both PhD students at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.
“But unfortunately we realized that the content of media messages is divided by the political stances. As many studies already hypothesized, we were worried about whether this partisan media environment would influence people’s behaviors. With UAS Covid National Sample Data, we were able to use statistical models to test this hypothesis.”
The researchers analyzed responses from the Understanding Coronavirus in America tracking survey conducted by the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research. The participants consisted of a nationally representative sample of 4,863 U.S. residents aged 18 years or older who completed COVID-19-related surveys online between March and June.
The surveys asked participants to report various virus-mitigating behaviors, such as wearing a face mask, and risky health behaviors, such as visiting a bar or club. Participants were also asked to report their trust in 18 news sources, which included local TV news, CNN and Fox News as well as non-professional sources such as social media and friends.
Around 29% of respondents said they trusted CNN more than Fox News, while roughly half (52%) expressed no preference between the two, and one in five (20%) said they trusted Fox News more than CNN.
The researchers found that people who trusted Fox News more than CNN consistently engaged in fewer preventive and more risky behaviors throughout the survey period, compared with those who trust CNN more than Fox.
Participants who expressed no media preferences, on the other hand, practiced more preventive and fewer risky behaviors than those with greater trust in Fox News during the last two survey waves, but they engaged in fewer preventive and more risky behaviors than those who trusted CNN for all survey waves.
“We know that broad scale messaging is important during a public health crisis and this is especially the case in an infectious disease pandemic. But the messaging can get complicated when dealing with a new, or novel virus, like COVID-19 in which we were all trying to understand our risks and best strategies for avoiding infection,” the researchers said.
“People often turn to trusted sources of information, like the media, to get clarity on complex situations. Our results suggest that those who trusted CNN for this information were better served as more of them responded in ways that would reduce the risk to themselves, their families, and their communities. But we would always encourage anyone to listen to the science and the recommendations of public health experts and officials.”
Health behaviors also changed over time, at first becoming more cautious in early April before relaxing as the pandemic unfolded. But these changes varied by media preference, with the speed of change being faster among those who trusted Fox News.
“We also thought it was interesting that behaviors shifted throughout the early stages of the pandemic. The number engaged in preventive behaviors, for instance, peaked in April and then declined through May for all media preference groups. But this decline was most pronounced among those with more trust in Fox, which matched messaging from Fox downplaying the lethality of the virus, questioning the efficacy of distancing and masking strategies, and highlighting the need to re-open the economy,” Zhao and Wu said.
The results are in line with another research paper, which found that Fox News viewership was associated with a decreased probability of staying at home during the pandemic. But like all research, the study has some limitations.
“It is difficult to establish the causal relationship between people’s media preference and their health behaviors. There are two possible underlying mechanisms: (1) People’s behaviors are influenced by the biased health messaging provided by politically driven narratives and (2) People’s behaviors are influenced by their own political stance, in which the media preference becomes a mere proxy for their political preference instead of the information itself,” the researchers explained.
“The significant association between media preference and behaviors is likely a combination of both mechanisms — we control for people’s diversity of information and access to professional sources — as they are significant, it means that people’s opinions are not entirely depending on their own political stances.”
“Our second limitation is that we selected Fox News and CNN as the proxies for political bias in the media. While this selection is largely due to the data availability as well as the partisan reputations of both news outlets, we recognize the potential for future studies to include more news outlets based on their political stances,” Zhao and Wu said.
The study, “Media trust and infection mitigating behaviours during the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA“, was authored by Erfei Zhao, Qiao Wu, Eileen M. Crimmins, and Jennifer A. Ailshire.
